London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Our Government clearly takes a dim view of the citizens of Romania and Bulgaria. Apparently, it is so concerned about the newest members of the European Union coming to work here, it is considering an advertising campaign “to correct the impression that the streets of Britain are paved with gold”.

Duh! Gold is not only prohibitively expensive as a street-paving material — but slippery too. Even foreigners would know that, surely? And do we really imagine Constantin and Dimitar will stay at home if we bang on about how wet it is here? I thought these migrants wanted to “flood” Britain? They might take the rain as encouragement.

In reality, the scheme simply shows what a desperate bind we are in. Whatever the fantasies of the Tory backbench, any British government will be caught between its obligations to the EU, the power of the business lobby and public opinion. Marketing is all it has to work with.

The fact is that Romanians and Bulgarians will have a perfect right to live and work here as of January 1, 2014. They will also be able to go to Germany, France or any of the 27 member states. A similar right is already being exercised by 1.4 million British people, freedom of movement being one of the binding concepts of the EU.

For it to work, you can’t make exceptions for countries you don’t like the sound of. Britain campaigned for the EU’s expansion eastwards, and British companies have benefited from cheap labour here and increased opportunities abroad. It is called the single market and even Eurosceptics concede that it is the best thing the EU has going for it.

The trouble is that the public sees immigration as the biggest single threat to British society. It is not just a question of jobs, wages and housing: the sort of economic freedoms that enrich British companies have a habit of doing the opposite for British workers. It is a question of social cohesion. “How can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can’t even speak the same language?” as Theresa May asked in a recent speech.

How indeed? Well, it would help if May stopped inflaming the fears of voters. For all the tough talk of immigration caps, there is little the Government is actually willing or able to do — while its attempts to impose limits on foreign students appear completely counterproductive. It would help too if both parties stopped taking legitimate concerns and focusing them on one particular group, in this case Bulgarians and Romanians (as if they are interchangeable).

The fact is, immigration is not nearly so big a threat to society as the fear of immigration — that is, the fear of the other in our midst. Europe has been down that road before and it did not end well.

Mantel — the writers’ curse

Forgive me if I do not rejoice at Hilary Mantel winning the Costa Prize. However brilliant her novels are, Mantel’s increasing dominance of the major literary awards — she is going for the hat-trick of Orange, Booker and Costa — is worrying. One of the most useful functions of a prize is to focus attention onto deserving unknowns. Just as EL James towers over the mass market and Jamie Oliver corners the cookery section, so Mantel has become a sort of literary superbrand.

You could see this as symptomatic of a winner-takes-all economy. Where once an industry might have sustained many medium-sized players, increasingly the rewards go to a handful. As Chrystia Freeland points out in her book Plutocrats, the phenomenon of the 0.1 per cent is just as prevalent in IT, mining and banking as it is in coffee-vending, dentistry and music — not so much plutocracy as a celebritocracy.

I’ve no wish to stop CCTV

In Berlin, a new game has been invented. It’s called Camover and it involves vandalising as many CCTV cameras as possible, Grand Theft Auto-style. There are now so many in Germany that civil liberties protesters have invoked comparisons with 1984. German paper Der Spiegel offers a more sinister parallel with modern Britain, where the average person is caught on camera 70 times a day.

There are many infractions of civil liberties that concern me in George Orwell’s centenary year but I can’t say CCTV is high among them. It may be simplistic to say that it makes us safer — though last year saw London’s lowest murder rate in living memory — but if it helps crime prevention just a bit, surely it’s a price worth paying?

Besides, the notion that we live in a 1984-style panopticon rests on the paranoid fantasy that all the cameras are watched by the same entity. In reality, one protects your newsagent, another keeps tabs on the ticket hall, another ensures that cars stick to the speed limit, and so on. Indeed, speed cameras strike me as a particularly efficient form of policing. Destroying them for the sake of it should be called what it is — childish vandalism.

The enemy of terrorism? Good filing

I failed to discern in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty any endorsement of torture. Nor could I see any firm clue as to whether torture is effective or not — I suppose sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and the fact that sometimes it doesn’t means you can’t be sure when it does. Still, the real breakthrough in the hunt for Osama bin Laden comes when Maya (Jessica Chastain) locates a dossier that has been missing for many years. Conclusion? In the War on Terror, filing is a far more effective weapon than waterboarding.